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Trois chansons de France, L115

Introduction

During the early months of 1904 Debussy’s first marriage to Lilly Texier began to founder as he succumbed to the charms of Emma Bardac, an accomplished singer and one-time mistress of Fauré. The Trois Chansons de France were the first Debussy works to be dedicated to her. He was no historian and makes no attempt to distinguish between the fifteenth-century poet Charles d’Orléans and the seventeenth-century Tristan l’Hermite. It was enough for him to feel that he was ‘going back’—partly because he was no lover of his own times with what he called its ‘tricoloured phrases’ (that is, expressions of French nationalism), and partly because he never lost his reverence for the directness of the music of Victoria, Lassus and Palestrina which he had first heard as a student in Rome. By and large the harmonies of all three songs are simpler and more firmly anchored to traditional tonal pillars than in the Bilitis songs. In rhythm though, the outer ones maintain a free flow of patterns, with repeated lines duly observed in the music, whereas the central La grotte is an exercise in stillness, with a short–long rhythm in the piano that impedes forward movement. Like Narcissus, we seem to find ourselves frozen in an attitude of contemplation.

Acclaimed sopranos, and frequent Hyperion guest artists, Lorna Anderson and Lisa Milne, both praised for their masterful interpretations of French music, join Malcolm Martineau for his second volume of Debussy’s sensual, impressionistic songs.» More

Close to this dark grotto,
Where the air is so soft,
The water contends with pebbles,
And light contends with shade.

These waves, tired of moving
Across this gravel,
Are reposing in this pond
Where long ago Narcissus died …

The shadow of this crimson flower
And that of those bending reeds
Seem in the depths to be
The dreams of the sleeping water.

English: Richard Stokes

Claude Debussy, who called himself a ‘French musician’ in opposition to Germanic/Wagnerian music, took part in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century’s revival of earlier French poetry for musical setting. La grotte is one of three settings of poetry by the seventeenth-century dramatist François l’Hermite, who wrote under the name Tristan l’Hermite, a powerful if shadowy figure at the court of Louis XI in the late fifteenth century in real life and a character in Victor Hugo’s Notre-Dame de Paris and Sir Walter Scott’s Quentin Durward in his fictive afterlife. This song is emblematic of Debussy’s signature stylistic mannerisms: the clouded harmonies that refuse to resolve in properly Germanic manner, the repetition of small patterns (the languorous pulses on each beat), the separation of the piano part into different registers, and the singular patch of pure triads to tell us that this grotto is where Narcissus died.